Book synopsis translation: The volume contains essays by eminent scholars and young researchers converged at the conference in Perugia in June 2008, several European nations and the United States of America.
The research on individual topics has been developed as an analysis of contexts and of the profound transformations in the last centuries of the empire, invested many aspects and forms of society: not only the imperial institutions and religious institutions, through a number of pivotal figures such as' Emperor, the principal officials, bishops, monks, but also the people of the city and the countryside, as well as those classes provincial forced to an osmotic process of militarization in the new lords of the West. The kaleidoscope of subjects covered - from production to justice legislation, the privileges of the Church in general and administrative organization of individual provinces, the historiographical production of the new matrix senatorial Christian literary forms - its image as a vibrant laboratory of the late ancient age of experiments: designed with care, lived deep in the consciousness of a shattered civilization.